So after what seemed like an eternity the day had arrived when we would head off on a four week adventure that would see us take in the Eyre Peninsula and both the Filnders & Gawler Ranges in South Australia.

We crawled South down the M5 with all of the tradie traffic in the mid afternoon with a view to getting to Wagga Wagga for an easy overnighter.  We arrived at about 7:30pm and used the last remaining minutes of daylight to set-up the trailer for the second ever time and already it was easier than the first, daylight assisting no doubt.  After maybe twenty minutes we were set and proceeded to sort dinner.  One of the important lessons we learnt with the set-up is to ensure that you connect the storm flap/tropical roof of the tent to the awning support coz once the awning is set-up you can't reach it.

Dinner was a simple affair and we planned on hitting the road early so we cleaned up and packed away what we could and sat down with an evening bevvy and prepared to find out about the weather resistant capabilities of the tent and awning as the heavens opened up and gave us a good drenching.  Considering that none of the canvas had been seasoned if faired very well with just a few drips from the seams on the awning and some leakage onto the floor area of the main tent, thankfully away from the bedding.  We'll keep an eye on this but experience tells me that once the canvas has been seasoned a few times we should be golden.

One thing that seasoning won't help as it's a design issue is the fact that there's a gaping opening between the awning and the tent over the left rear corner of the trailer that allows water to flow in at its leisure. We made sure that we had the awning sloping downwards towards the outside so at least it didn't funnel down that way.  We would have to wait until we got more familiar with the set-up to decide if we could alleviate this problem.

The pack up that morning was uneventful and we were away much earlier than anticipated for the long slog to Adelaide and nothing to report contrary to earlier towing reports, the Patriot X1-GT tows like a dream.

We arrived in the Adelaide beachside suburb of Semaphore for a two night stop catch up children and grand-children.  We didn't have the kids room tent fitted and the Patriot fitted on the standard caravan site with no no problems.  If we'd had the kids room attached I'd imagine we would have had to swivel the trailer 90 degrees and run across the site to get the length needed, this is only a suspicion though.

We were worried about security in the caravan park as from our experience thats when most camping thefts occur.  We headed to Bunnings and purchased a couple of packs of padlocks.  A couple of four packs of Lockwood Absa Alloy 30mm silicone covered locks took care of the over centre latches on the all of the storage compartments, eight in total.  We also had a spare 40mm version of the same lock, sans silicone that we used to lock the spare wheel swing away in place.  The lock set-up gave us peace of mind both at night and during the days when we would stop in the many small towns and communities to explore or top up supplies.

After the family commitments were taken care of it was time to head for the Eyre Peninsula and some free or, off grid camping.  We found a place called Carrow Wells and after a short jaunt down some relatively smooth dirt roads and bit of a sandy track we found a nice sheltered and secluded spot behind the sand dunes.  We had found a relatively level site so had no major issues with levelling the trailer using the onboard compressor to operate the air bag suspension.  We did find that the built in spirit level wasn't bang on accurate and we did feel a little head down feet up that first night, a simple flick of the switch and it was sorted for night two though.

We spent a few nights at Carrow Wells before packing and heading down the coast towards Coffin Bay.  There's a great spot down in the Coffin Bay National Park that involves some simple off roading and leads down to a couple of very secluded spots, you can find 'em on Wikicamps.  This was the first real foray into towing the Patriot in an off road situation and again there is very little to report other than the fact that it's compact size made it easy to turn around at the bottom.

We had howling winds here that were approaching the trailer from the North or man cave end of the trailer.  We'd set up the man cave awning extension for the first time and decided to lower the poles as much as possible to try and deflect some of the wind over the tent.  It survived the night with just a couple of pegs pulled out of the sandy soil.

It was now though that we were starting find a couple of areas of concern design wise and for today we'll start with the awning extension.  The part that zips to the main tent is great but it has to be said that the methodology behind attaching it to the main awning is pretty ordinary.  It was very difficult to attach, looked like a dogs breakfast and impossible to get any sort of tension on.  I'm quietly confidant that it will make a great catch pool with a good nights rain fall.

Anyway onwards and upwards, after a three night stay we packed up and moved on finding a fantastic organic pig farm on the way to our next stop (we didn't know where this would be at this point in time!).  We grabbed some of their incredible bacon and checked out their antiques and collectables store, amazing.

We headed Westward and pulled over at road house littered with the usual paraphernalia that outback road houses seem to accumulate over their lifetime.  It was ten thirty and we figured a couple of toasted ham & cheese sandwich's would be ideal to get us through to lunchtime.  We ended up chatting to a local bloke who walked up from his place just down the road to buy a new pair of thongs, summer was on the way after all.  Terry was a nice bloke and he suggested, between swigs of his JD & Coke from a tin that we pull into Sheringa Beach, just down the road a bit.  We decided to take a punt follow Terry's directions and aren't we glad we did, it was spectacular.  It was now that the Patriots ease of use whilst still being attached to the vehicle came into its own.  We quickly opened the kitchen side storage compartment and put the jet boil on and had a coffee whilst soaking up the view, thanks Terry.

Whilst we thought Sheringa Beach was amazing it was still fairly early and we decided to move on.  About 100Klm's down the road we spotted a sign for Venus Bay and it looked amazing, we hit the brakes and washed off enough speed to make the left turn, just.  Venus Bay the township almost doesn't exist, if your looking for a walk to the local pub or club in the evening this isn't it.  There are a bunch of houses, mostly used for holidaying and a caravan park where we were fortunate enough to blag the last spot over looking the water.  You're allowed contained fires and so we decided this would be home for a few days.

The wind was approaching from the rear of the trailer, South East and we decided to set up a couple of awning walls, it was fresh after all.  The design of the Supa Peg awning has been played with to work with the Patriot Camper and this creates the second of our list of design issues that, thus far, have all been related to the canvas work.  When the Supa Peg awning is fitted to a vehicle a tie strap is used to pull the awning all the way around and create tension on it, not an option with the Patriot CS3 tent being where it is.  So whilst initially looking like a clever design idea, the Patriot fix is to have the awning pole, that would normally be restrained with a tension strap retained by the spare wheel swing away.  This is fine until you want to put a wind break wall along where the spare wheel swing away rests.  It makes installation difficult and leaves black tyre carbon all over the awning wall, which still does a job of slowing the wind but it looks bad and reeks of design short cuts being taken.

The stay at Venus Bay was amazing, we met some great people, the pelicans were friendly and we could have just stayed put but we were forced to move on as the place was booked out. So move on we did, to Streaky Bay.  Again it was another caravan park and this one a little more like the new modern style of Big 4 or NRMA style of all in one resort.  It was within walking distance of the town so we stayed a night, explored the town and moved on to the Gawler Ranges.  Streaky was also home of the first failure of the Patriot X1-GT.  The site we had been given was slopping fairly steeply towards the water and when using the onboard compressor to level the trailer it failed.  The compressor still ran but it didn't pump any air into the suspensions air bags.  There was a loud pop and the show was over.  At that point I suspected that it was split airline or that it maybe even popped out of one of the fittings.  We left it for now as it was late afternoon and we wanted to explore instead.

The next morning we lowered the trailer down to the correct ride height and thought we'd have a look when we got to our next camp site as it was only an hour or so drive up the road.  We took the opportunity to ring Off Grid Outfitters and let them know about the failure so at least there was a record of the fault so if we couldn't fix it on the road they could upon our return.  I asked if they had any clues to which they replied 'call Patriot HQ'.  Now after spending a lot of years in retail leisure products I would have expected a 'let me contact Patriot for you and see what they have to say, do you mind if I pass on your contact details to them?'

I rang Patriot and they were far more helpful and gave me a bunch of clues for where to look and they suspected it was a popped line.  We were fortunate to find a level site in the Gawler ranges, we'd entered in from Minnipa and just drove around around until we found a spot at Mattera Camp Ground.  Before we set up the tent I emptied out the forward storage compartment on the left hand side of the trailer as this is where the compressor was located.  Removing the panel on the left near the water tank switch gives you... er, access.  All of the fittings appeared to be intact and there was no sign of split hoses.  Rainey operated the the compressor whilst I listened for the sounds of leaking air, nothing.  Just the compressor spinning away in its normal fashion.

So the next thing to do was check the fittings behind the control panel on the right hand side, four Allan key type screws hold the panel in place.  Swinging it out of the way revealed nothing untoward and quick flick of the compressor switch revealed that again there was no air leaks.  There was nothing more we could do here and it would have to wait until we'd returned home, the search for level ish sites would be our motivation for the rest of the journey.

We'd now been living with the Patriot for about two weeks and we were still playing around with storage arrangements.  It's one of those things I guess that you don't really know what works until you use it, a lot.  The other issue is that when you're on the road, if there is something you decide you don't need you either throw it away or put up with it until you get home.  At this stage we kept the man cave for BBQ gear and set up stuff like pegs, ropes and cordless drill etc (we use screw in tent pegs).  We also kept a food grade water hose in there.  Our sullage, or grey water hose was kept in the wet storage boxes at the rear of the X1-GT.

With our decision to use our old Coleman Eventemp 3 Burner gas cooker in conjunction with the Webber BabyQ I looked around on our travels and found a gas bottle POL fitting T-Piece and a POL to 3/4" adapter which allowed me to run both from the one gas bottle.  It's annoying when you have two gas bottles run out at the same time so now I can just swap over to the other one and get the empty refilled at the next opportunity.  The negative of the T-Piece is that it doesn't have any type of valve so you have to have both stoves connected so you can control the gas flow.  I tend to unscrew it when not in use so if we pull up for a quick one nighter and just want to use the Coleman the T-Piece stays in the man cave.

The wind that we'd had on the coast had stayed with us up into the Gawler Ranges and the tropical roof flapped like crazy and prevented a decent nights sleep.  We cooked Bacon & Eggs for breakfast on the campfire before deciding we really wanted to spend more time in the Flinders ranges so we had to make a sacrifice, packed up the trailer and moved on.  We headed East out through Buckleboo and down towards Kimba before rejoining the highway to Port Augusta.

We spent some time in Quorn stocking the pantry and checking out the historic buildings and railway station, it's an interesting town and worth a look.  If your a train buff it's worth researching what days the trains run, but anyway this blogs about the Patriot X1-GT not the journey itself.

We found the best place to carry pantry items is in the ample rear slide out drawer of the rear compartment.  We use the left side for food items and the right side for other kitchen stuff like pots and pans, paper towels, tea towels, dish cloths etc.  It works well but we will have to do something about the pots and pans though as they are just a bit too big for the space, they fit but take up too much of it.  Any bulk dry foods that we take on a longer trip such as this live in a couple of Sistema containers in the back of the Prado.

The rear main storage compartment of the X1-GT is a good space but it fills very quickly.  We carry our Gstove camping stove and it's associated accessories as well as our porta potty and spare canvas.  This pretty much fills it.  Anything stored at the front of the space is a right royal pain in the backside to access and the guys at Drifta do a slide out tray which looks like the solution.  My only concern with it is that there will be some loss of space but I guess the counter to that is that it's more usable.  We'll give it some thought.  In the meantime though we'll just have to lean in, use tent poles and various other means for extracting gear stowed at the front of the trailer.

We took the right turn at Hawker and headed towards Wilpena Pound, the place to book National Park camp sites.  After some guidance we settled on a place and started the hour long, mostly bitumen drive that had some lightly corrugated dirt for the last 10-15Klm's.  The area itself looked great and contained about a dozen well spaced camp sites, ours was too small to fit out trailer, damn.  We were faced with the choice of the hour long drive back to the Information Centre or look for something nearby outside of the National Park, we did consider just taking a spot that we would fit into but the last thing we wanted was to have a late arrival turn up and demand their spot that they had booked.  We decided to find something else and did our dough on the National Park site.

We found Alpana Station 5 Km's South of Blinman and at $15.00 per vehicle per night for an un-powered site we jumped on it.  We were in Bill's Paddock, set amongst the massive River Gums alongside a dry river bed, there were toilets nearby and we had the place almost to our selves.  We quickly set up the tent and awning and gathered some wood for a small fire, two reasons, there wasn't much around and the wind was picking up.  Willie Weather advised that the wind would drop after about 9:00pm. Little did we know that the opposite was about to happen and the Patriot CS3 Tent and Supapeg awning were about to cop a beating.

We called it a night fairly early, more to escape the blustery conditions then any real need for sleep.  We tossed and turned as the wind picked up, it sounded like a freight train as it made its way down the dry river bed towards us.  It would hit and the trailer would rock from side to side, it felt like we were onboard a boat at anchor in a severe chop.  It was disconcerting given the proximity of the huge widow makers standing quite close by.

It was about 1:30am and we heard this enormous roar as the the next gust came through which was followed by a load crack as our awning folded itself up and over the top of the tent.  I went out and strapped it into its folded position as best I could in the conditions, estimated wind speeds the day claimed gust of up to 70kmh.  There were broken poles sticking out of the canvas a bits of awning support legs still pegged to the ground.  Once the awning was secured we got in the car and moved to a clearing well away from the Gum tress, and there we slept.

The wind had calmed overnight and we made our way back to the trailer to access the damage.  The tent stood up to the challenge which was great to see and all the trees had stood fast in the onslaught, now for the awning assessment.  We undone the straps holding it in place and folded it out into the open position.  One of the plastic hinges had snapped in half which had allowed the awning to fold in half, and as mentioned one of the legs had pulled in half and I simply slid it back together and it functioned as intended which meant that the ole hadn't bent.  That aside it looked fine, the hinged bracket had splayed open and I easily bent it back into shape.  There was also some minor tearing in one of the pole sleeve seams, just pulled stitching for about 25mm.  All in all I was pretty stoked as we really didn't want to fork out large sums for a new one.  We wouldn't be able to access the spare parts to repair it though so I used some bush mechanics best friends, tip ties, to hold it in place each evening when we set it up.

We took some time exploring around the Flinders Ranges before moving on towards Mildura and the Murray River region, time was getting away from us so we had to press on, adding many new places to our must do list that we were forced to pass along the way. We went into the river land area from Renmark and travelled many of the tracks and trails towards Mildura, the trailer handled it well and few shallow water crossings caused no concerns.  The tracks were fairly slippery due to recent rains and looking at sky we were in for plenty more with a large storm cell looming ever closer.  We decided to get out whilst we could, the thought of being stranded, whilst having certain appealing aspects, you know fridge full of food and beer kinda thing, would have been hard to explain to our bosses.

We ended up finding a nice low key van park on the banks of Lake Cullulleraine, it was reasonably priced, you could have fires and the sites were grassy and level.  It comes highly recommended if you need the sanity of a van park with full amenities.  We moved through Mildura to re-provision the pantry and beer fridge before heading North to Broken Hill where time only allowed us to spend one night before turning right and heading East towards home.  Rainey had some work commitments in Dubbo so our arrival date was not negotiable.

I spent the time at Dubbo un-packing and re-packing things seeing if there was a convenient way to arrange the plethora of gear that carry.  I also fitted our Duncan Biscuits shelf to the kitchen of the trailer.  This is a great addition and well worth the messily $150 that Mr Biscuits charges for his handy work.

The installation was a fairly easy affair, it's just a case of making sure the mounting bracket is level. I did it by eye because I figured that using a spirit level would only be accurate if the trailer was dead on level.  It wasn't difficult to gauge along the edge of the sink unit.  I ended up drilling the middle hole first and then pop riveted the bracket on and then simply swivelled it up or down until it was inline with the top edge of the shelf, as mentioned.

From Dubbo it was an uneventful trip home with a quick one nighter at Lake Windemere near Mudgee, the sites are severely sloped and not having our compressor working meant that we had to dig a hole for the right hand tyre to sink into.  We now have levelling ramps.

Trip Distance: 5,565Klm's

Total Mileage: 5,906Klm's